Published on Friday, January 28, 2011,
updated Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Prospect magazine has published my review of Hugh-Aldersey-Williams's
delightful chemistry book,
Periodic Tales. Here is an extract in which I was struck by the
parallels between finding specialised jobs for the metals and
finding specialised roles for individuals in society:

The best science writing emulates fiction,
creating plots, surprises and characters out of its esoteric
material. The science writer's trick is to transmute the dull
tinplate of fact and theory into the precious gold of truthful
entertainment. Thus James Watson turned the discovery of the
structure of DNA into a charming farce (The Double Helix, 1968);
Richard Dawkins turned gene-based evolution into a gripping
detective story (The Selfish Gene, 1976); and Simon Singh turned
the history of mathematics into an epic (Fermat's Last Theorem,
1997).

The elements' most renowned appearance in
literature is in chemist and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi's The
Periodic Table (1975). Each chapter used an element relevant to his
life at the time as a theme. (This partly inspired me to link each
chapter of my 1999 book, Genome, to a human chromosome.) But the
periodic table itself is ideal material for "novelisation," because
each element has its own personality, both physical and cultural.
It is a cast of vivid characters already.

The elements tell the story of human
specialisation; and specialisation explains prosperity. When people
have to be self-sufficient they have to be generalists, as good at
foraging as they are at entertaining themselves-so your food and
entertainment are only as good as you can make them. But when
people began to exchange things they were good at for those others
were good at, the result was a higher standard of living for all.
So I get the Coen brothers to make movies for me, Delia Smith to
try recipes for me, Steve Jobs to design my electronic products and
the local supermarket to source my food-all in exchange for the one
or two things I produce. The more we specialise as producers, the
more richly we diversify as consumers.

The discovery of the elements shadows and to
some extent explains this evolving history of specialisation. The
ancients knew of just seven metals: gold, silver, copper, tin,
iron, lead and mercury. By giving each specialised roles, they
improved their living standards-tin for hardening bronze, lead for
moulding, silver for coinage and so on. By the modern era only one
more metal-zinc-had joined them (although platinum was known to
natives of the Americas). But then came a steady flow of new
metals, each of which finds its particular role in technology and
society: tungsten for hardness, aluminium for lightness, chrome for
polish, neodymium for magnets, barium for medicine. Each finds its
niche as surely as each profession and vocation does in human
society. Just as our story is one of specialisation, so the story
of chemistry is one of purification.

Each metal marches into our lives along a
path from novel to banal, says Aldersey-Williams. Aluminium was
once so difficult to make that Napoleon III used aluminium cutlery
for only his most favoured guests and gave his son, the Prince
Imperial, an aluminium rattle. Then it became so cheap that it was
considered, well, cheap. Titanium, once rare and exotic, is
becoming ubiquitous. For niobium and tantalum, Aldersey-Williams
writes, "the journey is just beginning." This is a tantalising
thought. There are so many elements whose talents we have barely
begun to use.